Kindergarten- Full day

In Here We Celebrate Every Small Victory

In kindergarten, we love to celebrate every small victory. Kindergarten is a big step in a child's life, and we want them to feel every small success. The beauty of small classes is my ability to really meet each individual child where they are at. Each day, students get one-on-one time in reading. We all know that reading is a huge skill needed for success. I am able to assess each students strengths and weaknesses and develop activities to help them progress. In a larger setting, students would likely be grouped based on generally where they are. Here at St Johns, I can meet then exactly​ where they are. I can find texts and activities to help them grow as readers (and yes, they are readers already!). Hand in hand with reading comes writing. Students really are encouraged to sound out words. We do various phonemic activities as part of our morning routine. For those unfamiliar with the term 'phonemic', we manipulate sounds in words. That could be taking out a sound, adding a sound, rhyming with a word, breaking a word into each individual sound, etc. Students can then take that knowledge and use it for both reading and writing. Often, my students ask me how to spell a word and I will just tell them to sound it out. It might not turn out right (let's face it, English has a lot of rules) but as long as it makes sense, that's great. We celebrate every time a student gets through a book. We celebrate every time a student tries to sound out a tough word. It's very important to me that students don't become discouraged. We also spend time each day working with first grade in reading and writing centers. Math is another time for one-on-one instruction if necessary. Typically, we do a few examples together and students try the rest on their own. They know that they can come sit with me if they are having a hard time. Generally, we find this to work pretty well.

Another large part of our kindergarten is religion. In addition to weekly mass, we spend time at our prayer table each morning, thanking God for the good things in our lives and asking for help with some not-so-good things. We also have a religion curriculum, which really helps me in explaining our Catholic faith to these kids. They know that they can ask questions and the curriculum really does a great job of bringing our faith into kid-friendly terms.

I could talk for days about all the great things that happen here. We have new iPads. We have flexible seating to help get some wiggles out while still being productive. We recently started a character building program school-wide. Here at St Johns, we are committed to not only providing your child with the best Catholic education possible, but really making them into generally good people who strive to live as Jesus wanted.